


in the hanging tree

by stillusesapencil



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Death, F/M, Hunger Games AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-06-27 23:54:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15695955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillusesapencil/pseuds/stillusesapencil
Summary: Are you, are you, coming to the tree?The Capitol is not beloved by either of them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING for implied suicide.
> 
> I'm sorry.

Lurching of the train wakes him. He stares at the passing fields, enjoying the fuzzy-headed sleepiness still lingering on him.

“Hey,” Jyn leans on the door frame, hands pulled into the sleeves of her sweater. 

He smiles and pats the bed beside him. She curls into his side, pressing herself firmly against him.

“You okay?” he asks.

She nods. “Just nervous.” 

Cassian gets it. The Capitol is not beloved by either of them.

_*Are you, are you*_

In a room with all the other district 6 victors, they watch all the sparkly show put on for the Capitol. Most of their fellow victors are too strung out on morphine to even notice all the glitter and lights.

President Snow stands on the podium decorated with the giant gold 75. 

Jyn sits beside him to watch the screen as they announce the twist for the Quarter Quell. Cassian takes her hand and squeezes. It will be fine. They only have to survive raising more tributes to die.

“As a reminder that not even the strongest of you will resist the Capitol, this year’s participants will be reaped from the previous victors—”

“No!” Jyn jumps up and screams. “No! They promised us peace!”

Cassian reaches for her. “Jyn—”

“This is not fair!” she yells, crying. “I just wanted to be left alone!” 

“Jyn—” But Cassian’s own tears are coming hard and fast now, and he hunches into himself as a door slams somewhere in the house.

_*Coming to the tree*_

Jyn was sixteen when she was reaped, Cassian nineteen. She chose him as her mentor for reasons unknown to him. Most people pick someone older, someone bigger or more brutal. Not someone who survived by hiding for as long as possible. Not someone who didn’t want to fight. Someone who only killed three people. Tributes are supposed to pick someone brutal. Someone strong. Not someone like Cassian.

Sometimes he wishes he didn’t do such a good job training her. Or maybe he wishes that she was a worse tribute.

“The goal is survival, not dominance,” he told her. “People die because they get too excited to fight, or they can’t endure.”

Jyn nods, rocking on her toes. “So, no fighting?”

“Not if you can avoid it. The people who like to fight die fastest. Like you.”

She mutters a quick, “Shut up Cassian,” before throwing the knife dead into the bullseye. 

Cassian quells all the feelings stirring in his gut. He doesn’t want her to die. He doesn’t want her to live with guilt either. And he cannot get any sort of feelings for her. That would be the doom of them both.

Just before they took her away, Cassian frantically shouted his last advice. “Don’t fight at the cornucopia! Just run away! Get away!” It was his last piece of advice. It was the piece of advice that condemned Jyn to her current life. 

Jyn followed it to the letter. Due to Cassian’s guidance, she escaped the games with hardly a scratch upon her. If the gamemakers would have let them be, instead of herded them all together, Jyn would have escaped the games without killing a single person. Nevertheless, when she encounters her first contender, she kills him with a ruthless precision that leaves Cassian shaking. 

After the games, she was healed within two weeks. They put her on display immediately, making her Panem’s top model in a matter of days. Magazines and news casts were dedicated to her beauty, to her physicality. She wasn’t even a legal adult, and they already fantasized about what she would be like in bed. 

Cassian watched from the background, and hoped she wouldn’t be forced into prostitution. Too many other victors suffered the same fate.

When she confessed her feelings for him in a public interview, he was as shocked as the rest of the world. They’ve barely spoken since her victory—how can this be true?

Of course, the Capitol latches onto the story with such ferocity, he’s surprised Jyn doesn’t have claw marks. 

He courts her respectfully, taking it slow. They try to stay low profile, but it’s hard. He takes her for dinners and to drama performances in the Capitol for show, and at home they do puzzles and learn to cook. They build furniture together, the trade of their district, furnishing homes of the poor. They build a relationship together, too, bit by bit, their shared traumas opened and doctored together. That’s the whole point. Together. 

It’s a slow, quiet romance for them, and Cassian wonders if she really loves him, or if their courtship is her way of desperately grasping for straws to save her from the spotlight. Cassian knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that he is all in. He loves her. That’s all there is to it. 

They get married a year and a half after her first confession, a quiet affair with only their family and friends present. She wears a simple white sundress and flowers in her hair.

The second wedding is two weeks later, dead in the center of the Captiol, and she wears the most ridiculous and elaborate costume he has seen since the initial parade. 

You can guess which wedding Cassian liked better.

_*They strung up a man*_

“What do you think they’re trying to stop?” she asks, looking out the window over the Capitol. “Why are they choosing people they promised to leave alone?”

Cassian shrugs, joining her. “It’s just more of their torture. One more way to keep us under their thumb. To remind us we have no power.”

She turns to him, burying her face in his chest as he settles his arms around her back. 

“I’m so tired,” her muffled words rise from the folds of his soft shirt. 

“Me too,” he mumbles into her hair.

When she pushes off his chest, her cheeks are streaked with tears. “If they choose you—if they choose you—I’m volunteering.”

He tightens his grip on her back. “No!” he snaps. “No! You can’t go back. Not for me. Promise me you won’t do that.”

“I can’t lose you like that!” She fists into the fabric of his shirt. “I won’t let them take you from me.”

Cassian shuts his eyes. “Let’s not think about it. Promise me that. Let’s just enjoy right now.”

She nods. “Promise.” 

_*They say who murdered three*_

Despite that, they do think about it. It’s the way she innocently requests him to be her sparring partner, just to work out, just to stay loose. It’s the way he starts cooking more protein-rich recipes, trying new things just for fun. 

It’s the way that, when they make love at night, Cassian clings to her like she’s driftwater in the sea.

_*Strange things have happened here*_

He dreams them, at night. He dreams the faces of the children he killed. He dreams the faces of the tributes he has been unable to save. He dreams the face of Jyn, terrified in the arena again.

He dreams fighting, sometimes a faceless monster, other times his fellow victors, and sometimes Jyn. “Kill me,” she pleads. “I’d rather die than do this again.”

He wakes with a shout, sweating. 

Beside him, Jyn sleeps. He presses against her back wrapping his arm over her torso. Dream Jyn says what real Jyn will not.

She’d rather die than go back to the arena. 

_*How stranger would it be*_

The night before the reaping, they pretend it’s a normal day. They eat dinner, wash the dishes, and go to bed.

Neither of them sleep.

They cling to each other with a passionate desperation, mostly silent. Sometimes they talk. 

(“If I die, I’m coming back as a ghost to haunt you,” she says.

“How will I know it’s you?”

“You’ll just know.”)

(“If we both get picked, what will be do?”

“Pull a district 12?”

“That’s already been done, we can’t repeat content.”)

(“Cassian…if I die…take care of my family for me.”

Cassian says nothing, and only nods his head, choking on the lump in his throat.)

As the sun started to lighten their window, Cassian said, “I can’t even be mad you got reaped the first time.”

“Why?”

“Because then I would have never met you.”

“Cassian…”

“If it wasn’t for that, I would have never met the love of my life.”

“Really?”

He looked into her eyes, saw desperation and earnestness. She really did love him. 

He kissed her, in the light of the newborn day, and hoped it wouldn’t be the last time.

_*If we met*_

The moment other names were picked from the hat, Cassian feels all the tension leave his body. He can breathe again. 

He stole a glance at Jyn, but she doesn’t look happy or even relieved. Her face is just tight. 

This wasn’t over for her.

_*At midnight*_

She paces in their kitchen, quick, sharp steps. 

He sits on the kitchen chair and waits. 

“We can’t keep doing this!” she bursts out. “They can’t keep changing the rules on us! Who knows—” she breaks off in a sob, covering her mouth.

Her gathers her to himself. “I know.” 

She rocks in his arms a moment. “I can’t keep doing this, Cassian.” He meets her eyes, and they look at each other for a long moment. 

“I can arrange for the stipend to go to my family,” she says. “Or you,” she adds, with faltering confidence.

“No,” he says quickly. “I won’t—no.” Maybe in another world they’d get a happy ending.

_*In the hanging tree*_

Cassian gets the rope, a strong, sturdy kind. 

They go to the far edge of town, where no one they know ever goes. 

He takes her hand and hangs on tightly. 

What is waiting for them is better than this.


	2. alternate ending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The alternate, happier, ending.

“I can’t keep doing this, Cassian.” He meets her eyes, and they look at each other for a long moment.

“We could make it work,” he says. “We have the money, the skills—”

She nods once, decisive. “If we’re going to do it, we’re doing it now.”

*

Turns out, two games victors disappearing is sort of notable, but they make it work. 

Stay low. Go fast. Say as little as possible and stay as short as possible. District hop. Hitch hike. Never say your real name. Disguises. 

And for the most part, they do okay.

*

The first peacekeeper finds them in district eleven, and they shouldn’t be surprised. It’s clear they don’t belong here. 

Cassian holds up his hands in surrender, praying he doesn’t die today.

Jyn jumps on the peacekeeper from behind and strangles him. 

They don’t talk about it, just hide the body and run.

*

District 12 is gone. The people have fled, and weeds grow between the cracks in the concrete. 

And, of course, it is crawling with peacekeepers. 

*

They run as fast as their legs can carry them, through the rubble that was district 13. Behind them, Peacekeepers also sprint, shouting and firing shots.

It’s exhilarating and terrifying all at once. He feels like laughing. They’re running away, literally.

It might be their last day on earth. He doesn’t care. They are going out with a bang.

A shot is fired. The peacekeepers falls to the ground.

“Hands up!” Two men in black uniforms aim guns their way. Unprepared for such an alternative, they stop and oblige. 

“Who are you?” Cassian asks.

“No friend of the capitol,” one replies.

“Neither are we,” says Jyn.

One man strips off his helmet, letting dark hair fall around his shoulders. “I’m Baze Malbus. Welcome to district 13.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was as far as I got before deciding I wanted to go with the darker ending. I don't normally write heavy stuff, so it was a new experience for me. 
> 
> I like to think that Jyn and Cassian joined forces with the rebels and helped overthrow Snow and whatever (it's been a while since I read the books) and then lived a quiet, gentle life together. I think they'd always be haunted by the games, but. They'd have each other.

**Author's Note:**

> If enough people ask, I will post the alternate, happy ending. [tumblr](http://www.stillusesapencil.tumblr.com)


End file.
